The business case for diversity initiatives, unconscious bias training, cultural sensitivity workshops, and more are some of the things that come under institutional focuses on Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, known more commonly as EDI. These are then applied to numbers of protected characteristics named in the Equality Act 2010. In addition to EDI being difficult to measure, insurgents have spoken out against it, as it seems to have taken many for fools as a phantom limb of the Anti-Racism Industrial Complex. As white people co-opt and profit from concepts and traditions of thought that Black and Brown people created and developed. For example, “identity politics” was coined in the 1970s by the Combahee River Collective to talk about their experiences of classism, lesbophobia and misogynoir. Meanwhile, the term has been co-opted by the political right in their war against equality.

As a freelancer invited into organisations to “raise awareness” on issues pertaining to racial inequality and more, I am asked to do one-time events … but never long-term interventions that shifts the scales of power and privilege. On a basic level, institutions like schools and universities can say look how much we are doing while actually not doing anything at all. Those who lose are the students and employees from historically excluded backgrounds including Black, Asian, LGBTQ+, disabled and other violently exploited groups. So, EDI then claims to want to end inequality while actually upholding it.

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During the COVID-19 lockdowns, I read a poetry collection called Postcolonial Banter by Bradford-based spoken word poet and educator Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan. Her poem “Decentring Diversity” illustrates the issues with more Black/Brown faces in high places as somewhat being interchangable with anti-racism: “Just because they give you a seat at the table doesn’t mean they want you to speak at the table” (p81). As expected, this reaffirmed my own suspicions about the EDI agenda: simply having more Black and Brown people as managers will not solve our problems. Encouraging more Black and Brown people to inhabit these institutions to be part of the labour force, while well-intentioned, will not solve our problems when there is little want to change working conditions (i.e racism at universities).

As universities continue to exploit international students (i.e through extortionate tuition fees and precarious visas … in partnership with the Home Office), these same institutions employ EDI “initiatives” to protect these power structures. Meanwhile, Black and Brown asylum seekers drown at sea.

Having more Black and Brown faces in high places continues be a harmful tactic in EDI discourse, as we saw with their deployment in The Sewell Report. Here the UK Government – a white instituton – curated a panel of Black and Brown “experts” in their fields (but not in racism) to conduct an inquiry that told us institutional racism doesn’t exist. As the same government continues with its “anti-woke” nonchalance in its attacks on Critical Race Theory. I want to see more people that look like me in spaces I inhabit. But at what cost? As political commentator Ash Sarkar states, “I mean, this idea that all you need is brown faces in high places is just absolutely for the birds. […] That just because somebody shares some of your identity attributes, it doesn’t mean that they are going to be organising in your interests” (DDN, 2021).

Increasingly, organisations illustrate their “commitment” to Equality & Diversity by creating a diversity role within senior leadership for a Black or Brown person, only to leave this person unsupported. These staff members become tokenised and end up speaking through whiteness (as per #FloellaGate during The Coronation, and The Sewell Report). This is what happens when you project Black and Brown people into jobs within organisations, unsupported, in places that were not designed for us in the first place. Black and Brown people should certainly consider these roles if offered (and if in an emotionally healthy position to do so), but organisations need to support them. Otherwise, we are being set up to fail.

When “diversity” is called for in organisations, it is useful to remember “diversity” is often just euphemistic language for marked difference, often Blackness and Brownness. In saying “diversity”, organisations are also telling us who institutions are designed by and who they work for. As scholar-activist Muna Abdi stated, “Diversity work is about manging the racial optics of a space. It is about bringing together people who are marked as ‘different’ into spaces that remain designed for those with power.”

In doing so, thus, some “differences” are then seen as neutral differences (i.e white; man; cisgender; ; heterosexual; neurotypical), and some are seen as Other (i.e Black; Asian; Muslim; woman; gay; neurodivergent; transgender). In giving specific groups power in a world that thrives on hierarchy and social order, historically excluded groups always lose … including racialised wo/men and people that reject all gender binaries. These groups are also some of the worse impacted by state-manufactured violence i.e how police departments treat some humans like objects to moved out of the way.

Under the “protected characteristics” named in the Equality Act 2010, in concept being victim of racism should be threaded through all of them. i.e Black women who are more likely to die in childbirth than their white counterparts. This is a very specific experience situated under “misogynoir” (Bailey, 2010), where anti-Blackness and misogyny join hands – exclusive to Black women in their position as Black women. Since 2010, the Equality Duty has largely been understood by organisations as somewhat positive:

Within higher education, gender equality frameworks like Athena Swann continue to privilege gender over race (Bhopal and Henderson, 2021). One must ask why? In short, some academics would say that with white experiences as the default setting (even in women’s experiences of misogyny), there is no priority for Black and Brown women to be included. So, for Black and Brown people, “progress” only tends to happen within a white supremacist system when those interests are conjoined with the goals of whiteness. In Critical Race Theory, we call this “interest convergence” (Bell, 1980). With the logic of diversity as a euphemism for Black / Brown (Bhanot, 2015), these initiatives also continue to omit the role of colour-conscious racism. This recentres white people as the “common sense” or universal worldview.

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Often, I recieve emails from schools and others asking for EDI training; I don’t do EDI work, I do disruption work – with much of it challenging dominant power structures! EDI work in my experience has been about reform, not reparations: it has been about firefighting within institutions and managing acceptable levels of violence (i.e through resilience / “cultural sensitivity” workshops, and unconscious bias training … ugh).

In her thread about ‘unconscious bias training’, Muna Abdi also reminds us that this not something to ignore as a “tick-box exercise, it is a deliberate organisational decision and originally implemented to limit corporate risk. Furthermore, Muna tells us how it diverts attention from a needed focus on institutional and structural violence into a focus on individual violence between people.

The Equality, Diversity and Inclusion agenda has been one of the biggest traps to hit education in decades. In March, I got into a discussion with a teacher on Twitter about this. Her tweet suggested that anybody against the EDI agenda’s concepts were probematic, when in truth there is a lot wrong with EDI because it doesn’t do what it says. And in fact, in being designed around giving institutions plausible deniability and limiting corporate risk it keeps the violence going.

In late 2022, I made a complaint about a university conference. The event was situated around anti-racism in education (or so it claimed), but the event reproduced racism and whiteness in different ways. I was horrified. What struck me is how “good white people” (Sullivan, 2014) had psyologically distanced themselves from “bad supremacists.” In my complaint, it reasserted how power works and that white “anti-racists” can be some of the most racist people to challenge. As Sara Ahmed writes, “To compain at the university is to be treated as ungrateful for the benefits you have recieved from the university: the freedom to make your own interpretation, the freedom to be critical, academic freedom” (p135).

For me, EDI has been about boxticking and efficiency, using the “racial optics” of Black and Brown people for university brochures, working groups, “race equality centres” and so forth, while campus police and security continue to harrass Black students. Universities draw on the language of EDI to encourage students and staff to study/work there: “non-performativity” (Ahmed, 2018: 333). But language does not translate to transforming hostile spaces into safe ones (better yet, less hostile … in academia, safe spaces do not exist for Black and Brown staff unless we make them ourselves). Thus the brochures, and other forms of marketing are used to create the appearance without action (Ahmed and Swann, 2006).

Or as Nirmal Puwar (2004) writes,

Too much and often, I see organisations framing their equality ‘commitments’ as diversity strategies sidestepping the violence of patriarchy, white supremacy, ableism, and cis-heteronormativity culture. In their bums on seats approach (also centring capitalism), they fail to recognise the violence of Equality and Diversity on the people they “intend” to help. We then see term like “decolonisation” used interchangably with EDI, when in fact they are more likely opposites; EDI keeps the violence going, decolonisation roots it out – literally attacks it at the stem! Intersectionality has also been used to give EDI more credibility or kudos, of course co-opted by white institutions trying to remain relevant.

As useful as EDI may be to some, its ethos in large, conflicts with both anti-racist work and decolonisation as a practice. Frequently, EDI work within institutions avoids looking at racialisation, thus centring whiteness as sameness and avoiding systemic oppression altogether. It does the work of the corporate agenda, hence “nonperformativity” (Ahmed, 2006). In this lack of intentional work (also supported by universities), racial literacy is sidelined. The late Lani Guinier (2004) defines racial literarcy as “the capacity to decipher the durable racial grammar that structures racialized hierarchies” (p100).

The power of white supremacy illustrates that those not racialised as white are not able to bring their full authentic selves into a space. For example, in my experience at work – I am either Black or disabled – but simultaneously policed from being both. This is how whiteness maintains its power in diversity work because EDI only allows us to look at one identity position at a time. Whiteness, thus reproduces itself in spaces where it is also being interrogated (Ahmed, 2021: 158). When you question the questioning, and the thinking behind the questions, you are then placed under surveillance:

Whiteness by care is still whiteness. Neoliberals would say relationships between humans are now transactional and purely economic in hope of monetary exchange. Violence by EDI is still violence. EDI keeps the violence going and is the neoliberal’s equality. It’s an empty gesture that gives institutions (like universities) plausible deniability and limits corporate risk. It is not the job of HR departments to look after employee welfare, but to limit corporate risk (i.e complaints about racism, sexual harrasssment etc etc). It just so happens the former informs the latter, and HR exists to protect reputational damage.

Indeed, EDI is full of empty promises that lumps the experiences of people whose daily lives are encompassed with being on the recieving end of extreme violence … with the same people who talk about this “journey of learning” we are all on … from a vantage point of privilege. The institutional equality agenda make me feel unsafe at work. Institutions enjoy talking up policy, but not the culture of terror that exists in the workplace. Not because of the dangerous potential of bad policymaking (though that also exists), but the dangerous potential of employees who fail upwards into unaccountable power.

“Things might appear fluid if you are going the way things are flowing. When you are not going that way, you experience the flow … [a]s a wall” – Sara Ahmed